Is Greek related to any other languages?

star_gazer

The Greek language has made significant contributions to humanity in general. First of all, the Latin alphabet was based on the Greek alphabet and according to several researches it has been proven that more than 150 000 words of the English language are of Greek origin. In addition to this, most of the international scientific terminologies are Greek. For example, the word “trigonometry” in Mathematics is based on the Greek “tri-go-no-me-tri-a”. Another example is the word “desert” in English. This word in Greek is called “erimos” and in the case of a scientific case, a scientist refers to it as “erimology” instead of “desertology” using the Greek word. It is also a fact that most of the names of our galaxy’s asterisms have Greek names, for example, Centaurs, Taurus etc. http://www.kwintessential.co.uk/language/about/greek.html Nov 29 10, 8:47 AM

satguru

I'll rephrase it a bit, I know many languages have borrowed from it, but are there any related whole ones as Spanish and Italian or English and German for example? I can't think of a single other language like Greek from history. Nov 29 10, 12:17 PM

Datsmeharse

Armenian most likely shares a common ancestor with Greek, post-dating the Proto-Indo-European root that most major language of Europe share. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graeco-Armenian Phrygian and Albanian are sometimes grouped with those two. Mind you, it's all Greek to me... Sorry about that... Nov 29 10, 12:21 PM

satguru

I was fairly close then as although English has taken on many words it spread to very few neighbours despite the power of ancient Greece presumably subsumed by Latin leaving barely any room for it except the eastern border. Nov 29 10, 4:29 PM

author

Hellenic (or Greek) constitutes a branch of the Indo-European language family. The ancient languages which might have been most closely related to it, ancient Macedonian and Phrygian, are not well enough documented to permit detailed comparison. Phrygian is sometimes linked instead with Thracian, but with "heavy Greek influence". Among Indo-European branches with living descendants, Greek is often argued to have the closest genetic ties with Armenian. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hellenic_languages Both being ancient civilizations, Armenians and Greeks have co-existed for centuries. There are ancient notes by Greek historians suggesting of the roots of Armenians. The earliest reference to Armenia was made by the Greek historian Hecataeus of Miletus in 525 BC. According to a hypothesis proposed by linguists during the 20th century, the Armenian and Greek languages share a common ancestor. This has led to the proposal of a Graeco-Armenian language, post-dating the Proto-Indo-European language. Herodotus suggests that the Armenians are descendants of the Phrygians. Plato had early noticed the similarities between the Greek and the Phrygian languages. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian-Greek_relations Nov 29 10, 10:18 PM

evil44

Of course Greek was based heavily on the Phonecian language that was spread to the Hellenic area by mercahnts from Tyr. Dec 06 10, 9:50 AM